Eggplant Puttanesca Sauce (Tested Canning Recipe)

Eggplant puttanesca sauce is a chunky pasta topping built on roasted eggplant, olives, and capers. It’s salty and savory in a way no jarred pasta sauce is, and a canner load puts six pints of dinner on the pantry shelf.

There isn’t much tomato in this recipe compared to all the other ingredients, and that’s what makes it good. The eggplant comes through instead of the tomato, and you end up with an eggplant, onion, and olive topping with plenty of salty umami behind it.

Two cups of dry red wine and a half cup of balsamic go into the pot, which is a lot of both. The eggplant soaks all of it up and doesn’t taste sharp at all, and the wine rounds the whole thing out. Everything gets roasted first, so the flavor is deeper than a stovetop sauce.

This is a tested recipe from The All New Ball Book of Canning and Preserving, which matters on a sauce this loaded with low-acid vegetables. If you like putting up dinner in jars, I have more pasta sauce recipes for canning, and the rest of my eggplant canning recipes are worth a look if your plants are producing faster than you can cook.

Choosing Eggplant for Puttanesca Sauce

Two pounds of eggplant is two medium to large globes at my house. Weigh yours rather than counting them, because eggplant size varies wildly between varieties and one grocery store eggplant can be most of the two pounds on its own.

Pick fruits that feel heavy and have tight, glossy skin. A dull or wrinkled eggplant has been off the plant a while, and those tend to be seedier and more bitter. You don’t need to salt and drain them for this recipe, since roasting drives off the water instead.

Any variety works for this. The long, slender Asian types roast beautifully and have fewer seeds, and the classic Italian globes are what I usually have coming out of the garden. Leave your skins on, because they soften in the oven and disappear into the sauce.

For the tomatoes, use paste varieties. Six pounds of Romas cooks down to about three pounds after roasting, peeling, and seeding, which is roughly 6 cups coarsely chopped. Slicing tomatoes hold too much water and thin the sauce out. If you’re deciding what to plant, there’s a whole guide to choosing tomatoes for canning on my other site.

Ingredients for Eggplant Puttanesca Sauce

The swaps people ask about first are the anchovies and the olives. You can leave the anchovy paste out entirely, since it’s listed as optional, and green olives work in place of the kalamatas as long as the total stays at a cup and a half. The wine and the balsamic, though, are the acid that makes this safe in a water bath, and those amounts don’t move.

Here’s what each part is doing.

• Paste tomatoes: Roma, San Marzano, Amish Paste, or any other meaty variety. They roast down without flooding the pot. Slicing tomatoes will work in a pinch, but the sauce comes out looser.
• Eggplant: Any variety, skin on, cut into 1 inch cubes. It drinks up the wine and the balsamic and turns silky in the oven.
• Red bell peppers: Roasted and peeled, they add sweetness against all that salt. Orange or yellow peppers are fine too, and I’ve used a mix of whatever was ripe.
• Onions: Roasted in their skins and then peeled, which keeps them sweet instead of sharp. They’re a bigger part of this sauce than you’d guess from the ingredient list.
• Dry red wine: Any dry red you’d drink. Nothing sweet, and nothing labeled cooking wine, which is salted. This is part of the acid in the recipe, so the full 2 cups goes in.
• Balsamic vinegar: The other half of the acid, and the half Ball added in a correction after the book went to print. Use vinegar labeled at 5% acidity, at the full amount.
• Kalamata olives: Pitted and chopped. They carry most of the salty, briny flavor. Castelvetrano or another green olive works as a straight swap.
• Capers: Drained, and no need to rinse them. If yours are packed in salt rather than brine, rinse those and go by taste on the added salt.
• Anchovy paste: Optional, and it doesn’t taste like fish in the finished sauce. It adds savory depth, and the tube keeps for months in the refrigerator. Fillets mashed to a paste work the same.
• Garlic: Fresh cloves, minced. Jarred minced garlic works fine if that’s what you keep on hand.
• Dried oregano, salt, and black pepper: Seasoning only, so adjust these to taste. I use canning and pickling salt because it dissolves clean and doesn’t cloud the jars, and there’s more on that in my guide to pickling salt and its substitutions.

Everything else is a vegetable, and the vegetable amounts are what the processing time was tested against. That’s the one part of the list to leave alone.

How to Make Eggplant Puttanesca Sauce

This is a two-part recipe. Everything roasts first, then it all goes in a pot with the wine and the seasonings for a short simmer.

Start the canner before you start chopping. A full water bath canner takes a long time to come to a boil, and you want it ready when the sauce is.

Roast the Vegetables

Heat the oven to 400 degrees F and line two rimmed baking sheets with foil. Don’t grease the tomato sheet.

Wash and core the tomatoes, cut them in half, and lay them on one sheet. Ball’s directions have you put them cut side down. I’ve tried it both ways and both peel easily afterward, but I’ve settled on cut side up, because the juices that run out onto the pan scorch when the tomatoes are face down. Roast them about 45 minutes, until the skins just start to char.

Ball says you can fit everything else on one sheet pan, but it’s not even close. You’ll need two more sheets to hold the rest of the ingredients. Put the onions and peppers on one, and the eggplant on another.

Halve and seed the peppers and set them skin side down, quarter the onions with their skins still on and add them. Give that sheet a light spray of oil.

Dice the eggplant, but don’t peel it. Dice it evenly and spread it out on a sheet. My eggplant took up half a sheet pan.

It goes on a second rack and both go in for about 30 minutes, until the eggplant turns golden and the peppers are tender.

Let everything cool on the pans until you can handle it. The tomato skins slip right off, and so do the pepper and onion skins.

Chop the tomatoes coarsely and keep the seeds and juice, since both go in the pot.

Simmer the Sauce

Put the chopped tomatoes in a pot that holds at least 6 quarts, then add the eggplant, the chopped onion, and the chopped peppers.

It looks like a lot of vegetables at this stage, and it is.

Add the wine, balsamic, olives, capers, garlic, anchovy paste, and dried seasonings.

Again, don’t cut down on the wine or vinegar. They’re both required for safe canning.

Stir well, bring it to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes, uncovered.

That short simmer is all it needs. The roasting already did the concentrating, so this step is about getting everything hot and married before it goes in jars. Taste it and adjust the oregano or pepper if you want to, and leave the rest as written.

Canning Eggplant Puttanesca Sauce

Keep your jars hot and waiting in the canner or in simmering water. A chunky sauce fills much faster through a wide mouth canning funnel, and it saves you wiping sauce off every rim.

Ladle the hot sauce into hot pint jars, leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Run a bubble tool around the inside to release trapped air, check the headspace again, and wipe the rims and threads clean. Set the lids on and screw the bands down fingertip tight.

Process pints for 45 minutes in a boiling water bath canner, with the water covering the jars by at least an inch. Adjust for altitude using the chart below if you’re above 1,000 feet.

When the time is up, turn off the heat and take the lid off the canner. Let the jars sit in the water for 5 minutes before you lift them out with a jar lifter. Cool them on a towel for 12 to 24 hours without moving them, then check the seals.

Ways to Use Eggplant Puttanesca Sauce

A jar over hot pasta is dinner in the time it takes the water to boil. It’s thick enough that it clings to rigatoni or penne without anything added, and a handful of parmesan on top is all it needs. It’s good enough to justify homemade pasta on a night when you have time for it.

Beyond pasta, it works anywhere you’d want a salty, savory vegetable sauce. Spoon it over grilled chicken or a firm white fish, fold it into cooked white beans for a quick supper, or pile it on toasted bread as an appetizer. It’s also good stirred into scrambled eggs, which is how a half-used jar usually gets finished around here.

For something closer to a dip, warm a jar and serve it with crusty bread alongside marinated peppers and a few olives.

Storage and Shelf Life

Once your jars are cool, press the center of each lid with a finger. A sealed lid doesn’t flex or pop back. Take the rings off before the jars go on the shelf, so a seal that lets go later is easy to spot.

Any jar that didn’t seal goes in the refrigerator and gets used within a week or so. You can also reprocess it within 24 hours with a new lid, and there’s more on that in my water bath canning guide.

Sealed jars keep their quality for about 12 to 18 months in a cool, dark place. The color darkens over time, which is normal for a sauce with this much wine in it. Label yours with the date, because a shelf of dark sauces all starts looking the same by February.

After you open a jar, refrigerate it and use it within 1 to 2 weeks.

Eggplant Puttanesca Sauce FAQs

Substitutions, the wine, and the anchovies are what come up most on a recipe like this one. Here are the answers.

Tomato Canning Recipes

Got more tomatoes than eggplant this year? Start here.

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Southern Chow Chow (Traditional Green Tomato Relish)

Old-Fashioned Green Tomato Jam

If you make a batch, I’d love to hear how it went.

Once the canner is out, it’s worth filling the rest of it. Here are more of my water bath canning recipes to go with it.

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